Section 01 - System Overview

The Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center (RCVRC), a nonprofit organization, and Bright Spots, a software development team, have joined together to develop RCTab as an open-source software package that provides post-election tabulation to determine results in a ranked choice voting election.

RCTab can process data from voting machines that are capable of exporting cast vote records (CVRs) and tabulate a single-winner or multi-winner ranked choice voting election according to the rules used in current state, county, or city election jurisdictions in the United States.

RCTab is hosted and developed on GitHub. This allows individuals and teams to collaborate on the development of RCTab. GitHub allows developers to work on different parts of the codebase simultaneously and merge their changes seamlessly, all under the close supervision of the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center and Bright Spots.

Users of RCTab should, in accordance with section RCTab Section 03 - System Hardware Specification, procure a Windows PC with the following specifications:

• Windows 10 or above Operating System
• 3.0 GHz processor
• 32GB RAM
• 10GB disk space

RCTab outputs the tabulation results in comma-separated values (.csv) tabular data format and creates an audit file for the RCV election. More information about the operation, software design, hardware requirements, and system design requirements of RCTab is available in the following sections:

• Section 02 - Software Design and Specifications
• Section 03 - System Hardware Specification
• Section 06 - System Design Specifications
• Section 18 - User Guide